There's a lot of news coming out of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today, but since we can't compete with the well-funded gadget blogs, I suggest you read up on the details at The Verge (or Engadget). One thing stood out to me, though. While the entire industry is moving towards more cores, more megapixels, more gigahertz, more display inches - Microsoft is doing the exact opposite. Windows Phone has been updated and optimised to run on slower hardware.

Maybe it will, but if what the blog says is true, MS is handling this "opening for variability" way better than Google.
Still, the hw part of WP7 ecosystem is still incomparably poor compared to even Symbian. They will not gain friends in Samsung or HTC of Huawei (who has just debuted their own SOC) before they fix that.

As a side note, WP7 phones may bring the smoother experience, but with apps that actually need some number crunching (like processing digital content on device in semi real time) Android shows its nails.